The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-Time
()
About this ebook
“... Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the
year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong,
and trouble in the world around us, should be active
with us, not less than our own experiences. ...”
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, a Fancy for Christmas-Time, bookends the series
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. Regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, Dickens had a prolific collection of works including fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of short stories and articles. The term “cliffhanger endings” was created because of his practice of ending his serial short stories with drama and suspense. Dickens’ political and social beliefs heavily shaped his literary work. He argued against capitalist beliefs, and advocated for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens advocacy for such causes is apparent in his empathetic portrayal of lower classes in his famous works, such as The Christmas Carol and Hard Times.
Read more from Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels (Quattro Classics) (The Greatest Writers of All Time) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ghostly Tales: Spine-Chilling Stories of the Victorian Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Vintage Christmas: A Collection of Classic Stories and Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegal Loopholes: Credit Repair Tactics Exposed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classic Children's Stories (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Classic Christmas: A Collection of Timeless Stories and Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHard Times Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gothic Novel Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Charles Dickens Collection Volume One: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Bleak House Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDavid Copperfield (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #64] Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Christmas Library: 250+ Essential Christmas Novels, Poems, Carols, Short Stories...by 100+ Authors Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Notes: For General Circulation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Christmas Stories of All Time: Timeless Classics That Celebrate the Season Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Greatest Ghost and Horror Stories Ever Written: volume 1 (30 short stories) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Big Book of Christmas Tales: 250+ Short Stories, Fairytales and Holiday Myths & Legends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings50 Beautiful Christmas Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Christmas Carol: Level 3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Short Ghost Stories Of Charles Dickens Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Charles Dickens: Four Novels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Charles Dickens Collection Volume Two: Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, and Our Mutual Friend Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOliver Twist: Level 4 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
Related ebooks
The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain, two ghost stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: Christmas Ghost Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain Illustrated Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain by Charles Dickens (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Heart of England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Princess and Curdie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Theirs Was the Kingdom Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Flirt Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Battle of Life A Love Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Battle of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the old Sun Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe House by the Church-Yard Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Princess and the Goblin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Question of Upbringing: Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the old Sun (a rediscovered novella by Hermann Hesse) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stories of Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAgnes Sorel: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGod’s Good Man Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Daltons: Three Roads In Life: Historical Novel - Complete Edition (Vol. 1&2) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Scarlet Letter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lathe Of Heaven Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad (The Samuel Butler Prose Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain - Charles Dickens

frontispiece-poster_edges-300.jpgTHE HAUNTED MAN
THE HAUNTED MAN
and the
GHOST’S BARGAIN,
A Fancy for Christmas-Time
———————————
Charles Dickens
———————————
19 December 1848
This edition was adapted from the 1913 Chapman & Hall cheap
Christmas Books edition (originally collected 1852) and the 1907 J.M. Dent and Co./E.P. Dutton & Co.gift
edition. It maintains the unabridged content and spelling of the original publications, though punctuation spacing and usage has been modernized and changed to American quotation style.
Published for the Supernatural Fox Sisters’ Supernatural History Series—collections of books and artifact reproductions focusing on places and events in supernatural history.
Cover image: An Awful Survey
by Francis Donkin Bedford (1864–1954)
1848 frontispiece by John Tenniel (1820–1914)
Typesetting, editing, cover design
& back-cover text by Katie Fox
ebook ISBN: 978-1-947587-09-0
Copyright ©2019 by
Katie Fox
Fox Editing & Publishing
San Francisco, Ca.
All rights reserved.
 fox-solid-small_copy.png

hauntedman-deco-CONTENTS.jpgCHAPTER I—The Gift Bestowed
CHAPTER II—The Gift Diffused
CHAPTER III—The Gift Reversed
CHAPTER I—The Gift Bestowed
Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that’s no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, Ghost, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour—who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?
Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like—an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still.
His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worn-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut —echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time.
When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct and big—but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in the streets bent down their heads and ran before the weather. When those who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners, stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of their eyes —which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly, to leave a trace upon the frozen ground. When windows of private houses closed up tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise. When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down at the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners.
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.
When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows, were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard wicket would be swung no more that night.
When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself —the very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to make his bread.
When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering.
When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire. When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and came. When he took no heed of them, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come or let them go, looked fixedly at the fire. You should have seen him, then.
When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make a deeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the